He’s right, of course. No major game company has an entirely spotless record. The industry’s most popular names all made mistakes, and sometimes those mistakes spelled doom. Others were just bumps in the road. We packed together the biggest blunders of the biggest game publishers past and present to see just how they bounced back— or didn’t.

Acclaim Exploits Infants, Dead People, Nude Bikers

Acclaim Entertainment built a catalog full of disappointment, releasing mediocre games based on The Simpsons, Batman Forever, and other popular licenses. Arcade ports like NBA Jam and Mortal Kombat II kept Acclaim in good business for a while, but the company’s financial issues piled up. By the early 2000s Acclaim found itself sued by clients from former employees to the Olsen Twins.

This led Acclaim to some disastrously desperate stunts. In the UK, the company offered the equivalent of $10,000 to any parents who named their child “Turok” in time for the latest game in the series. Acclaim also proposed slapping Shadowman: 2econd Coming ads on actual graves throughout England, just in case any grieving families wanted to rent out their loved ones’ tombstones.

Acclaim’s last cry for attention came with BMXXX, a 2002 stunt-bike extravaganza that promised rampant nudity on a level seldom seen in a mainstream video game. It became a flop in the sales charts, a laughing stock among the game industry, and a momentary punching bag for concerned parents. Acclaim never rebounded, filing for bankruptcy in 2004.

Activision Wastes Guitar Hero

Imagine that you have one of the biggest hits of the decade: a music game called Guitar Hero. You’d want to crank out as many games as possible with new music, but you’d also want to avoid overloading the market and tanking the whole line. Activision forgot about the second half.

Guitar Hero turned many heads with its 2005 debut, fusing rhythmic gameplay with a big plastic peripheral right out of Konami’s Guitar Freaks. Many sequels followed over the years, with arcade editions, portable versions, and special packages for bands like Aerosmith and Van Halen. It grew to be too much by 2009, and Activision put the entire series on hiatus while shifting around its development staff. A 2015 comeback attempt called Guitar Hero Live didn’t rise to the challenge, and Guitar Hero’s future is hazy once again.

This isn’t the only series that took an Activision overdose. The Tony Hawk line went on a suspiciously long vacation around 2011 after choking previous years with new games, and the Skylanders series seems headed for a market glut.

Atari Turns Down the NES

Older generations easily remember when Atari ruled video games. The company’s VCS (aka the 2600) was a fixture of living rooms throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s, and just about every major game, from Pac-Man to Mr. Do, crossed paths with the Atari name. No one suspected at the time that their greatest rival would be the company that made Donkey Kong. A company called Nintendo.

The two discussed a deal circa 1983: Nintendo had launched a new system called the Famicom in Japan, and Atari wanted the international rights to it. Yet a schism emerged when Donkey Kong appeared on Coleco’s Adam computers, violating Atari’s exclusivity rights to the game. Atari dropped all interest in the Famicom, preferring instead to back their own new system, the 7800.

The rest of the decade wasn’t kind to Atari. The home-console market crashed due to overproduction and poor quality control, leaving Nintendo to pick up the pieces and market the Famicom themselves under a new name: the Nintendo Entertainment System. Nintendo soon rebuilt the console industry in America, usurping Atari’s position in living rooms and children’s vocabularies. Atari never retook the crown, and their attempts fizzled with the ill-conceived Jaguar system in the mid-1990s.

Capcom Ships a Semi-Finished Street Fighter

Capcom tends to keep their mistakes minor and well-hidden. They may have waited too long to debut Street Fighter III, but their frequent upgrades for Street Fighter II sold well enough. The same goes for Resident Evil 6, a market success despite critical and consumer complaints. Still, Capcom couldn’t avoid a high-profile setback with the recent Street Fighter V.

After re-igniting the fighting game craze with Street Fighter IV, Capcom made some surprising choices with Street Fighter V. It stayed exclusive to the PS4 and PC, despite its predecessor’s appearance on the Xbox 360, and the game’s launch stumbled many times. The single-player mode was anemic, online play was buggy, and the Steam version seemed particularly flawed. Capcom took a piecemeal approach to fixing things, upgrading features and adding new characters one by one.

Street Fighter V isn’t a blatant failure, but it took nearly two years to meet Capcom’s sales estimates for its first year. It’s a strangely flawed production for one of Capcom’s biggest series, and its reputation perhaps dragged down Capcom’s next big fighter, Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite.

Ion Storm Gets Bitchy

It’s one of the most notorious phrases in video game advertising: “John Romero’s About to Make You His Bitch.” So claimed the magazine spots for Daikatana. It promised an innovative first-person shooter from the designer, known for his work on id Software’s Doom, Quake, and Wolfenstein 3D. Romero’s name put Daikatana in the spotlight upon its 1997 announcement and kept the game afloat throughout numerous delays. When it finally debuted in 2000, reviewers were unimpressed and players were vicious.

Daikatana was a disappointment as a game, but the infamous magazine spot made it a joke. Some took the ad as a challenge and responded by ripping Daikatana apart. Others were just offended and ignored the game entirely. It damaged Romero’s reputation and the name of fledgling studio Ion Storm, which Romero had founded with designer Tom Hall.

Daikatana’s train wreck might’ve sunk the studio had it not been for its successors: the innovative, now-classic cyberpunk shooter Deus Ex and the witty sci-fi RPG Anachronox. Ion Storm shook off Daikatana’s disappointment and survived, though not for long: Eidos shuttered the company in 2005 after the departure of many employees. Daikatana and that embarrassing ad might not be to blame, but they certainly didn’t help.

Konami Loses Kojima

What do you call it when a company apparently wants to screw up? That might be the case with Konami. All sorts of classic series sprang from their stable since the mid-1980s: Castlevania. Contra. Metal Gear. Silent Hill. One by one, they’ve fallen away in recent years, amid reports that Konami’s bigwigs just don’t care about video games now.

Nothing riled fans more than Konami’s treatment of P.T., a horror game rooted in Silent Hill and crafted by Guillermo Del Toro and Metal Gear’s Hideo Kojima. A demo of the game (or perhaps a mini-game teaser for it) appeared on the PlayStation Network in 2014, but by early 2015 Konami had canceled the game, yanked the demo from the PSN, and caused Del Toro to swear off future game projects. Kojima reportedly clashed with Konami over this, and he left the company to form Kojima Productions in 2015.

All of this may be part of Konami’s plan. The company shunned beloved game franchises in years past, focusing on mobile games and proven successes like Yu-Gi-Oh and even a line of health clubs in Japan. A new Metal Gear is on the horizon, but many fans already claim Konami’s given up on games.

Microsoft Kills Kinect

The Nintendo Wii sent other companies scrambling to embrace motion-sensing gameplay, and no one scrambled quite like Microsoft. The Kinect launched for the Xbox 360 in 2010, and it was a compelling novelty: instead of waving around a remote as the Wii demanded, the player gestured at a sensor hooked up to the Xbox 360.

Microsoft had bigger plans for the Kinect when its newest system debuted. The Xbox One included a Kinect sensor in every bundle, and Microsoft touted its voice commands and improved motion detection. Yet the Kinect simply wasn’t in demand any longer, and Microsoft eventually released the Xbox One without any Kinect. Official support for the device ended in recent years: first for the Windows edition, then for the Xbox 360 edition, and lastly for the Xbox One.

Microsoft can’t call the Kinect a total failure, though. The little sensor tested out concepts that survive in the new HoloLens smartglasses and other, more compact inventions. In a sense, the Kinect will be with us for a good while—it’ll just be smaller.

Nintendo's Virtual Boy

Nintendo’s missteps seem minor in retrospect. The Nintendo 64’s cartridge format drove away other companies, but the system still sold well. The Wii U’s frosty reception killed the momentum of the Wii’s success, but Nintendo jumped back into the fray with the Switch. The company’s biggest blunder, the Virtual Boy, did little damage on paper, but its effects reached far.

The Virtual Boy sounded promising in the mid-1990s: a 3-D rig designed by Gunpei Yokoi, who’d brought about major Nintendo innovations from the D-pad to the Game Boy. In practice, it was a disaster. Released in 1995, the system offered only red-and-black graphics, and the oversized high-tech goggles array was neither conveniently portable nor comfortable to play at home. Regardless of the games’ quality, the Virtual Boy endured a rough reception from the public, even spawning complaints of headaches. Nintendo discontinued it a mere seven months after its launch.

Yokoi left Nintendo shortly afterwards. He founded a new studio and desiged the Wonderswan handheld for Bandai, but a traffic accident claimed his life in 1997. Nintendo and Yokoi’s colleagues maintain that his resignation was a coincidence, but it’s safe to assume that Yokoi, who reportedly wanted to delay the Virtual Boy until technology improved, would have been more likely to stay with Nintendo had his invention succeeded. Rushing the Virtual Boy cost Nintendo one of its most important creative minds.